Fingerprints of Russian Disinformation: From AIDS to Fake News

WASHINGTON — The spurious story line alarmed Americans. It spread like wildfire, distorting facts into outlandish fictions, despite being attributed only to obscure sources. And it inflamed already divisive politics before the United States government concluded — perhaps too late — that it was a Russian disinformation campaign.

“We would take any misinformation like that very seriously,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters at a briefing on Monday.

Ms. Sanders was responding to a question about how the Trump administration would view a “disinformation campaign by a foreign government” — specifically, fabricated and sensational news distributed by Moscow in the 2016 election. But presidents have for decades dealt with the phenomena of Russian-peddled fake news, if under a different name.

It is rooted in a Cold War plot that fanned a conspiracy theory about the origins of AIDS, earning a rebuke from the Reagan administration, and now serves as a lesson about Russian disinformation and the subversion of weighty issues worldwide.

“Today, the fingerprints of Russian disinformation campaigns have been left on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mark R. Jacobson, a professor at Georgetown University and former Pentagon adviser, told a congressional hearing in November.

“Whether it is ‘Brexit’ or the American election, Russian propaganda still infects U.S. social media networks,” Dr. Jacobson said. “And we see the same sort of divisive propaganda that we saw during the Cold War.”

Called Operation Infektion by the East German foreign intelligence service, the 1980s disinformation campaign seeded a conspiracy theory that the virus that causes AIDS was the product of biological weapons experiments conducted by the United States. The disease disproportionately impacts gay men, and the Reagan administration’s slow response had escalated into suspicions in the gay community that the United States government was responsible for its origins.

“The K.G.B. picked up on that, and added a new twist with a specific location: Fort Detrick, Md.,” where military scientists conducted biological weapons experiments in the 1950s and 1960s, said Douglas Selvage, the project director at the Office of the Federal Commissioner for Stasi Records in Berlin.

The K.G.B. campaign began with an anonymous letter in Patriot, a small newspaper published in New Delhi that was later revealed to have received Soviet funding. It ran in July 1983, under the headline “AIDS May Invade India: Mystery Disease Caused by U.S. Experiments” and pinned the origin of the disease to Fort Detrick.

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An anonymous letter in Patriot, a small newspaper published in New Delhi that was later revealed to have received Soviet funding. CreditHistory, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

The choice of Patriot was deliberate, said Thomas Boghardt, a military and intelligence historian who traced how the campaign unfolded. “It had no explicit links to the Soviets and was an English-language newspaper easily accessible to a global audience.

“The Soviets intuitively understood how the human psyche works,” Dr. Boghardt said. He said the playbook was simple but effective: Identify internal strife, point to inconsistencies and ambiguities in the news, fill them with meaning and “repeat, repeat, repeat.”

A September 1985 memo to Bulgarian intelligence from the East German secret police served as a conduit. The disinformation campaign aimed, according to the Stasi, “to generate, for us, a beneficial view by other countries that this disease is the result of out-of-control secret experiments by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon involving new types of biological weapons.”

A month later, the Soviet journal Literaturnaya Gazeta published a paper titled “Panic in the West or What Is Hiding Behind the Sensation Surrounding AIDS.” It included accurate information about the disease and Fort Detrick but cited the Patriot letter to connect the dots.

The paper received international attention and its allegations were repeated around the world including in Kuwait, Finland and Peru. CBS News, black newspapers, the gay press, niche publications critical of the C.I.A. and the right-wing presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche all promoted the conspiracy theory. (Mr. LaRouche flipped the claim on its head, accusing the Soviets of using AIDS as a weapon.)

It was also cited by former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa in rejecting antiretroviral drugs to treat AIDS in the 2000s, contributing to at least one public health crisis. The hip-hop artist Kanye West has referenced the conspiracy theory — “And I know that the government administered AIDS,” he rapped in 2005 — in at least twopopular songs.

The same tactics have shown up in recent years.

Birtherism, the homespun conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, was picked up by Russianstate news media and then cited by right-winggroups. The so-called Pizzagate scandal, the baseless allegations that John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, abused children in a pizza restaurant, was similarly amplified by Russia accounts.

Mr. Selvage said those conspiracy theories would have thrived on their own, even without Russian agitation. He said foreign information warriors simply exploited optimal “operational environments.”

“Had U.S. politics not already been polarized, these sort of efforts would have not gotten any traction,” he said. “They’d be whistling in the dark.”

Mr. Jacobson likened the AIDS campaign to fake Russian accounts and campaigns like Blacktivist and Black Fist that exploited the Black Lives Matter movement and heightened racial tensions in 2016.

The Twitter bots that helped spread viral fake news during the election last year have now morphed into cyborgs, or accounts that blend automation with human curation, said Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher on the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University. They are more difficult to identify, but still latch onto divisive issues and seek to deepen the wedge.

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A 1985 article in the Soviet journal Literaturnaya Gazeta titled “Panic in the West, or What Is Behind the Sensation About AIDS.” It includes a photo of Fort Detrick, at bottom, along with photographs featured in Life magazine about individuals in the United States whose lives had been affected by the disease.Creditvia Douglas Selvage

“The point is not to just tell a lie, but to tell a lie in increments,” Ms. Bradshaw said. “They get a little bit more absurd as you start release more and more stories.”

She pointed to the first case of social media disinformation, when Twitter and Facebook users lobbed theories about the disappearance in 2014 of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Rumors of its fate included a natural disaster, Ukrainians trying to assassinate President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a lost and confused World War II battalion emerging to shoot down the plane.

“This was not to convince people about the World War II battalion but telling them to distrust the media because they can’t get the story right in the first place,” Ms. Bradshaw said.

The White House, too, has recently attacked the news media for errors by majornews outlets. But on Monday, Ms. Sanders said the Trump administration would not compare a foreign government’s disinformation campaign with a reporter’s mistakes.

In the case of the AIDS disinformation campaign, a similar argument about uncertainty over the disease’s origins proved beneficial for conspiracy theorists.

Jakob Segal, an East German biologist who promoted the Soviet campaign, seized on growing doubts from a theory that the virus had jumped from African green monkeys to humans. He called it “ludicrous” in an 1986 interview with the London Sunday Express and accused the American government of playing it up as a cover-up.

By 1987, the Soviets began to sour on the campaign as Moscow’s scientific establishment rebuked it.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz also accused Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who was then the leader of the Soviet Union, with hawking “bum dope about AIDS.” Mr. Gorbachev ordered the K.G.B. to stop spreading the conspiracy theory and after the collapse of the bloc, former Soviet intelligence officials owned up to it.

“In the case of the AIDS disinformation campaign, they were forced to give up on it,” he said. And of election meddling, “if the goal of the Russian government was to get a U.S. government that was favorable to lifting sanctions, it essentially backfired.”

Dr. Boghardt had a slightly different take. The approach of disinformation is basic, but “it works,” he said.

“Throw enough dirt, and some will stick,” he said. “This is what they’ve internalized. It didn’t win them the Cold War, but it did undermine the credibility of the West and American institutions.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: The Fingerprints of Russian Disinformation: From AIDS to Fake News. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe